bedroom eyes

I’ve been concentrating mainly on the bedroom lately. (I find that if I try to actively decorate more than one room at a time, the room starts losing focus. That doesn’t mean I won’t buy or make anything for another room if I find a bargain or something that’s perfect, it just means that I’m concentrating efforts mainly on the one room.)

I think people watching me decorate believe that I have to have everything perfect from the start, but that’s not actually true. What is true is that I do have a base level that I want a room to be at before I can let it slide as it is until such a time as I can deal with it. (The room has to be able to function, too, no matter how temporarily, or it drives me crazy.)

I know this doesn’t qualify me as technically OCD, but a lot of people seem to react as if it does. :)

ANYway. The bedroom.

As mentioned earlier, the physical set up of the room has changed some plans since my first post about the bedroom. I’ve found a new picture, albeit not one of a bedroom, that has the sort of feel I want for the room.

What I like about this room that I want to emulate in our bedroom is the peaceful calmness of it. I like the different textures, though I’ll probably add more texture for more coziness.

Lots of glass and use of shiny silver. I like the concentrated spots of the accent colors, and the balanced way it’s used throughout the room. I like the dark wood accents, which I’ll have more of.

I’ve more or less settled on a monochromish palette of pinkish cream (the color of the walls) through a beige through a warm mole color (that grey-brown also often called dark mocha), with accent color of duck egg blue, or at least a duck egg blue.

I had meant to use the linens from our old guest room for our bedroom, but the yellow cream of it clashed dreadfully with the pink cream of the walls, so I decided to go with white (not coincidentally, my high count linens that are currently in storage are white) on the bed. The headboard is already a warm beige in a sueded fabric.

I found a duvet cover and European (US)/Continental (UK) pillow covers at The White Company – on sale! Their Santorini line with dove grey hemstitch (a very taupey grey) is perfect. Though the thread count is only 200, it’s a percale, so it should be both hard-wearing and smooth.

After a stint working at Bed Bath & Beyond, and after having spent so much of my life sleeping on high count sheets, I have to say that I’m totally a linens snob.

(My ex, who is still one of my best friends, once told me that he used to think that I was a bit of a princess for insisting on high count sheets, but once he’d tried to sleep on non-high count thread sheets after sleeping on them for so long, he had to admit that there’s very much a difference in the comfort level.)

Narrowing down the search for the right duvet set meant visiting John Lewis, The White Company, TK Maxx, and Marks & Spencer in rapid succession. (I would have gotten Debenhams in there too, but it’s a lot further out.) Having settled on the Santorini, I went back to John Lewis, because the color of a certain decorative pillow had caught my eye.

Oh dear! More ruffly roses!

I promise you, ruffly roses is not usually my style, and neither is buying expensive decorator cushions, but so far I’m losing out on the buying temptation game.

This was the perfect color (I love duck egg blue, and this particular duck egg blue is my fav), texture (felted wool), and size (small, but not too small — it’s a double bed, so two would have been too many, which means I’m actually spending the same amount of money that I would have on two cushions, right?). So I decided to buy it.

Oh, those clever John Lewis floor people. As I turned around from the wall of cushions, what should I spy but this? —>

(On my monitor, this is too light — it’s a classic mole color, and quite a bit darker in reality.)

Hmm. Right. Well.

It works altogether too well with the pillow (yes, they’re designed to go together), and it was exactly the right color for the room, plus I needed something to sit on, and this was both comfortable and fun. J was going to think I was insane, and I knew exactly what kind of lifted-eyebrow-but-humoring-his-little-Oriental-pearl-anyway look he was going to give me, but oh well.

I’m sitting on it right now as I type this. It was a lot of fun getting the pouffe, cushion, and huge amount of stuff I got from TK Maxx home. (Including a large grey flannel tote that I got for all of the reading material that always collects by my bedside, which I want to keep off my bedside table, and also will hold my laptop.) The John Lewis staff concocted a bag for the pouffe out of several John Lewis bags and a lot of packing tape.

Let’s just say I took a taxi from John Lewis to the train station, and then another taxi from the train station to home.

The chest of drawers is now in place. I’ve taken off one of the cabinet pulls to see if I want to try painting them a nickel color. I’m starting to clean up the chest itself (it’s very, very dirty around the edges, but since it’s a dark oak, it just looked like darker oak), and trying to decide whether to paint the whole thing a silver/zinc color or not. I may decide to keep the dark wood color and simply put very modern nickel pulls on. I’ll try painting the old pulls first to see.

Still to come: buy a new light fixture and get it installed, find a tallboy I like (just bought a truly ugly plastic tub set to hold clothes until I find the right piece), find something for the desk/table for J’s side of the bed, re-wire and hang crystals (currently in storage) on the chandelier lamps I brought from the US, and find fluffy flokati (maybe — the real problem with flokati rugs is that they don’t stay fluffy without a lot of work) rugs for the sides of the beds for the extension cords/leads to run under.